Aleppo death toll mounts; rescue workers killed

BEIRUT, April 26 (Reuters) - Attacks by government forces
and rebels killed at least 30 people, including eight children,
in the last 24 hours in Aleppo, a city seeing some of the worst
of a renewed escalation in the Syrian war, a monitoring group
said.

Intensified fighting has all but destroyed a partial
ceasefire that started at the end of February, with
U.N.-led peace talks in disarray.

In Aleppo, divided between areas controlled by the
government and by rebels, 19 people were killed by rebel
shelling and 11 were killed by government air strikes, the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

That adds to another 60 people killed over the weekend in
Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the war, according to the
Observatory. Air strikes were also reported in rebel-held areas
near Damascus and in Hama province on Tuesday.

In a separate incident west of Aleppo, five Civil Defence
workers - first responders in opposition-held territory where
medical infrastructure has all but broken down - were killed by
air strikes and a rocket attack on their centre.

The Observatory and Civil Defence colleagues said the attack
appeared to have deliberately targeted the rescue workers in the
town of Atareb, some 25 km (15 miles) west of Aleppo.

"The targeting was very precise," Radi Saad, a Civil Defence
worker, told Reuters.

"They were in the centre and ready to respond. When they
heard warplanes in the area they did not think they would be the
target." Two people were seriously wounded and ambulances and
cars belonging to doctors were destroyed, another Civil Defence
member, Ahmad Sheikho, said.

It was unclear whether Syrian or Russian warplanes had
launched the raids. There was no immediate comment from the
Syrian government.

Each side accuses the other of targeting civilian areas in
the five-year-old war that has killed more than 250,000 people.

A Syrian military source said the army would "respond
firmly" against rebels attacking government-held parts of
Aleppo. State news agency SANA said what it called terrorist
groups, including the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, had
shelled those neighbourhoods.

In the north of Aleppo, insurgents resumed bombardment of a
Kurdish-controlled neighbourhood, Sheikh Maqsoud, according to
the Kurdish YPG militia.

"Civilian areas were shelled at random," the YPG said.

The YPG and its allies have been battling rebels, including
groups backed via Turkey by states opposed to President Bashar
al-Assad, for several months near Aleppo and close to the
Turkish border.

Rebels accuse the YPG of collaborating with the government
in trying to stop people using the only road into
opposition-held Aleppo, something the YPG denies.

Turkey sees the YPG as a terrorist group and is concerned at
moves by Kurdish forces to expand their control along the
Syrian-Turkish border, where they already hold an uninterrupted
400 km (250 mile) stretch.
(Reporting by John Davison; additional reporting by Tom Perry
and Marwan Makdesi in Damascus; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)